Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from Szeretgom.hu's János Cserép.

Date : February 2009

Can you tell us about the application, site, or service in which you have adopted GlassFish?

Szeretgom.hu is a local community site I've started building in 2006 for the town and region of Esztergom, Hungary. The application is a custom-developed, JPA-based CMS with some social networking functions built-in or under development. It started out as a spare time project but nowadays we are developing it's foundation to be a reusable white label social networking platform (more info at http://www.metaprime.hu/users/cserepj/szgom.pdf).

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

I was working at Sun Microsystems Hungary as a software consultant and worked with Application Server 7 and 8 on some smaller scale projects. When I left Sun and started a small Java consultation business I took my knowledge of GlassFish and Sun Application server with me and successfully evangelized it in several projects in Hungary as a low-cost, high-value application server platform.

Did you go through an evaluation process before selecting GlassFish? If so, can you tell us a little bit about the process and results?

No, I was already familiar with GlassFish.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

I've started with a pre 1.0 build of GlassFish in early 2006. Right now our web applications run on GlassFish v3 Prelude. We're using Sun Web Server as a reverse proxy in front of GlassFish and also for serving static resources, images.

On what operating system do you run GlassFish? Do you use the same OS for both development and production deployment?

The server OS is OpenSolaris 2008.11 - we were running on Solaris 10 until the upgrade in last december. We are doing development mainly on Windows Vista.

On what hardware platform do you run GlassFish? Do you use the same platform for both development and production deployment?

Production platform is a Sun Fire X2100 M2 server. Development is done on regular PCs.

Have you purchased a GlassFish subscription?

Not yet.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

The Web Container and tha JPA runtime (previously Toplink Essentials, now Eclipselink). My primary web framework of choice is Apache Wicket.

Are you using OpenMQ?

No.

What do you like most about GlassFish?

The CLI is very nice, domain configuration can be automated very easily. The administration console also stands out from the competition.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

Clustering and enhancing EclipseLink to support cluster wide cache coherency would be a very nice feature.

Are you using any open source or commercial frameworks or tools in your application?

The application is built on Apache Wicket. We're using Hudson as a continuous integration server which also runs on GlassFish.

Does your application use a database? If so, which one?

Yes, PostreSQL.

Are there any figures about the scale of your adoption which you would like to share?

Not really.

How has GlassFish performed since your application went live? Have you run into any production issues which you would attribute to GlassFish?

There were some Toplink related bugs in the first few months, but the final 1.0 release fixed those. One nasty bug with 2.0 was the issue with jsessionid always getting appended to the url when a new session was created which was very bad from a SEO point of view.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?

User only.

Thank you János for sharing this with the rest of the GlassFish community!